TLochNessieM

I’m a double major in Accounting and Spanish, and I had the opportunity to study in Mexico for six weeks this past summer. It was completely awesome! I’m still not quite sure how it all came together – I was a freshman and saw an ad for an information session in our school paper and my one professor had talked about the program, which was faculty led. My mom also saw the ad while she was visiting me and encouraged me to go. So, I went, thought it sounded good, talked to my parents (who highly encouraged me), and then applied. Was accepted, and next thing I knew I was down there. It was an incredible experience, and made me want to study abroad again – just last week I submitted an application to study abroad in Spain. I really hope I am accepted, and I’m reflecting on what I learned about studying abroad from my past experience: scholarship deadlines are tricky ‘cause sometimes they come before you know you are accepted; you need to take pictures of everything – homestay family, street, house, university, classrooms, etc. – and not just the more touristy places you visit b/c it’s the places/people you spent the most time at/with that you are going to want pictures of; have a blog and update every day with just what you did that day (great why to keep family and friends in the loop about what you are doing, and an even better record of your times there as you look back on your experience); get out and really get to know the city your are staying in; make friends outside your group and family; etc. I am planning to implement what I’ve learned from my first study abroad to make the second one as great as possible (provided, of course, that I’m accepted…).

I think I’ve got this one down… under certain conditions. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on this site and looked at these goals I made. Reading through them, a lot are still on my plate, but I don’t consider this to be one of them. Currently I use two alarms – my regular alarm that sits next to my bed and my cell phone alarm that sits on my dress across the room and goes off two minutes after my regular alarm. I find this configuration really works for me. The two minutes between the alarms gives me time to snuggle in bed just a little bit longer and come to terms with getting up. By the time my cell phone goes off, I’m resigned to getting up and ready to go. I’m not exactly coherent (I’m a complete night owl), but I’ve got the momentum to get up and keep going. I used to abuse the snooze button, but now I’m up and going 2 minutes after my initial alarm, and can’t understand how my roomie can stand being woken up 1/2 hr before she even gets up and therefore has her sleep interrupted unnecessarily early. The times I’ve had problems with this is when I’ve had breaks at home without my alarm, and wasn’t able to do the two alarm thing, and when I didn’t really have something to do right away that motivated me to get up, but I’m currently working my way around that and consider that to be a separate problem with motivation.

Inbox is cleaned out. Emails are organized in folders. Both my student and personal email addresses are both in Thunderbird. I am very happy.